The new Internet is all about collaboration. Wikis, team rooms and other technologies look to foster team collaboration as an effective way to quickly reach better results. As community efforts like wikipedia yield amazing results, the private sector is looking into using similar tools in the enterprise to make significant productivity gains. The question of course is, does this model work within for profit organizations.
I do not believe that it is very controversial to say that in all teams there are high and low performers. In the past, this could easily be detected by the team leader. However, as we are moving to virtual (geographically dispersed) teams and virtual offices, understanding perfectly the level of contribution for each team member can be challenging, specially if the software used to publish and share those works does not include some kind of management system. It may seem silly but this is a real problem because while most employees are willing to share, they expect to be compensated or recognized for doing so, and I believe that this is a fair request. There have always been individuals taking credit for someone else’s work, and as technology evolves, this could become easier than ever. If we want to work effectively in this new world, we must make sure that everyone is fairly evaluated.
The problem therefore consists in accurately measuring individual contributions. This is not easy. How-much recognition do you get for a new presentation, compared to say modify or add a couple of slides to it? What is the value of a new reusable component? Those are obviously subjective values, but an automated system that tracks contributions can help.
If we think that web 2.0 is all about collaboration, we should use that fact in order to rank contributors. By allowing employees to rate documents or even specific versions of that document, we can see how a document has improved over time as a result of individual contributions. This information could allow us to quickly find out who the top contributors are and reward them accordingly. Today, most wiki tools lack those features which, from my point of view makes them unsuitable for the enterprise. There are fundamental differences in what motivates a person to work on an altruistic project such as wikipedia and what motivates a person to work for a company. This needs to be recognized by enterprise collaboration software vendors. It is nice that enterprise wikis offer features such as better security, spam prevention and change control. However, that is not enough. For collaboration to work, employees must be certain that they will benefit personally from sharing their work. Today, most systems I have used do not recognize that fact and therefore fail after a while, usually when the managers stop forcing employees to use it.